SWARM: A highly-scalable WMS and tile-based weather image solution

Weather Decision Technologies Inc. (WDT) specializes in weather content delivery to a wide variety of consumers and commercial customers worldwide. Increased interest in the use of live weather data within interactive maps and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have led WDT to create a unique weather imagery solution called SWARM. SWARM provides highly-scalable delivery of tiled and geo-referenced weather imagery, including radar, satellite, tropical storm, lightning, and numerous additional layers for use within mapping applications. It currently facilitates a wide variety of products and consumers, including mobile applications, aviation users, and numerous media clients serving high-volume websites around the globe. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) front-end coupled with geographically-distributed caching presently serves over 10+ terabytes of tiles per day. On-demand tile response is measured in milliseconds, and distributed processing allows SWARM to easily scale with additional content layers as needed. Recently, WDT has further developed this solution to include an OGC-compliant Web Map Service (WMS) interface. This paper will present a overview of the system, current product examples, and discuss future plans.